The Empire of Love, and: Desiring China, and: Romance on a Global Stage: Pen Pals, Virtual Ethnography, and “Mail-Order” Marriages

In recent years, a growing corpus of work that reviewers call the “anthropology of love” has opened an ethnographic portal to transnational worlds where colonial affect, alternative intimacy, and other emotional binds are some of the organizing epistemes. These ways of understanding are crucial, as the authors often argue, for tracing new relational circuits, the formation of desire in political economies as well as the cultural politics of neoliberalism. What does it mean then to “love” (one) an-Other in such a transnational context? How are questions of racialized sexuality, exoticism, and colonial legacies reframed when we attend to love’s labors — affect, feelings, erotics, connection, deep understanding, spells, attraction, intimacy? If we approach this emotional, millennial terrain as the seventh moment of ethnography, following Norman K. Denzin’s postulation of six other moments that have characterized its development in the 20th century, the books covered in this review exemplify the “emotional” shift or affective turn in the field.¹ But what are the mutual implications of such a shift for ethnographic and performance scholarship?

This review essay brings together three texts that are anchored in ethnographic perspectives by scholars with transnational links, including Australia, China, the United States, and the Philippines. By links, we mean the national identifications of the authors, their encounters in multiple sites, the stories of their subjects, and the shared experience of cross-border temporalities and spaces.

Elizabeth Povinelli’s The Empire of Love maps an area of study that traverses various sites in the US, Canada, and Australia. Povinelli opens her book by focusing on a sore that she contracted in an Aboriginal community in Northern Australia to ground the assertions she makes about the relationship between what she terms the “autological subject” in “genealogical society” (each connoting discourses, practices, and fantasies about individual freedom and social constraints upon the individual, respectively [3–4]). She also details a series of encounters with members of an experimental queer activist group called the “radical faeries” in several faerie sanctuaries in the United States. Povinelli seeks to understand the tension between the kind of spiritual world–making activities of the radical faeries as a counter-public and the ways those activities are interpreted and challenged by a genealogical society invested in “actual” indigenous communities and rituals.

Povinelli’s study signals a return to the body as a site that makes visible the disciplinary discourses about the body as it circulates throughout a global network of competing power structures. By concentrating on her own body and the sore she contracts, she drastically shifts the grounds of her relationship to the Aboriginal subjects she studies, obscuring her “true” object of study and the demarcation between self and other that is central to the traditional ethnographic encounter.

Lisa Rofel’s Desiring China evinces an interest in the liminal, transformative spaces of “becoming” as key sites for thinking through a transnational shift in ethnographic work. She sees a transformation of the Chinese national imaginary on 4 June 1989, the Tiananmen demonstrations that also facilitated the influx of foreign investor capital to China, leading to the construction of a new Chinese citizen-subject that accompanies what she terms “desiring China” (13). Her project is to track the ways that this desiring subject is created in the realm of public culture, as with the exploding popularity of soap operas such as Yearnings, for example. Rather than read China as a site that receives and “indigenizes a global message” in a uniform way, she argues that the introduction of new economic policies into...